So you want to be a jockey agent, huh? Reap all those riches and enjoy the good life?

Well, before you quit your day job you might want to talk to Hollywood Park track announcer Vic Stauffer, who’s worked for such top riders as Joel Rosario, Martin Garcia and, most recently, Tyler Baze and discovered the job wasn’t for him.

Stauffer, 51, recently gave up his part-time gig booking mounts for some of the elite jockeys on the Southland circuit in order to keep his sanity and maintain his health.

Bottom line: Stauffer didn’t know when to stop working, he was obsessing over his second job as an agent and it was affecting not only his health but his relationship with his wife and stepdaughter.

“We would go on vacations, we’d sneak over to Vegas for a couple of days, and I’d be on the computer and my wife would say, `You’ve got to leave this alone. You’ve got to take this time and just relax.’ And I couldn’t do it,” he said.

“I just couldn’t do it because I always felt like I was leaving some stone unturned.”

He recalled one morning in October 2008 after he’d taken over Rosario’s book and showed up at the track about 4:45.

“I don’t think I really ever had any real appreciation for what the hell I was getting myself into,” Stauffer said. “The very first day, I had my condition book, I had my pen, I had my cell phone, I walked through the stable gate and the first trainer I went up to, I didn’t even get my entire name out.

“I went, `Hey, how ya doin? My name is Vic Sta …’ and he said, `I (bleepin) know who you are and I think it’s (bleepin) (bleep). So you get the (bleep) away from me and don’t ever talk to me again, you piece of (bleep).’ So I was 12 seconds into it, and I went, `OK, well, this is going to be an interesting job.’ I think I went and sat in the car for about an hour, called my wife and said, `This might not be for me.”‘

The trainer felt Stauffer had stolen Rosario from his old agent, Vince DeGregory, and he wasn’t shy in letting him know it.

“The thing was, Joel approached me. I didn’t approach Joel,” said Stauffer, who had handled the 25-year-old rider’s book at Golden Gate for about three months when Rosario rode in Northern California. “So I wasn’t the reason Vince got fired.

“If you’re thin-skinned or if you take things personally, you will last about 12 seconds. I hated every day I did it, but if Hollywood Park closes I have to go back and do it again. I have an eighth-grade education, so where am I going to make enough money to live here in Southern California with a wife, a stepdaughter and a mortgage?”

There is no doubt the money is good.

Stauffer said super agent Ron Anderson pocketed $75,000 when Garrett Gomez won the $5 million Breeders’ Cup Classic last month aboard Blame. Stauffer got a nice check for about $29,000 when Rosario guided Dancing in Silks home first in the 2009 Breeders’ Cup Sprint.

“I mean, it’s big money,” Stauffer said. “In 2009, just Rosario alone paid me over $250,000. But for me, my quality of life, my relationships and feeling physically good (was more important). I don’t care if it was five times that. I think your health and your family should be your absolute No. 1 focus, and then you go from there.”

Stauffer doesn’t expect or want anyone to feel sorry for him. He said Baze was surprised by his decision but supported it 100 percent.

“I never really realized how much I had entrenched myself into it until Tyler got hurt at Del Mar this year, and then I was forced onto the sidelines,” he said. “And lo and behold, I started being happier, I started getting along better with others, I started having a much better outlook on life, I started feeling physically better.

“This just wasn’t for me.”

Stauffer had, as he put it, “piddled around” as a jockey agent in the Midwest, Arizona and other parts of California before taking on Rosario’s book the second time. He soon found it was a whole new ballgame in the intensity department.

“Here, it’s like a pack of wolves trying for a piece of meat,” he said. “I mean, it is intense, it is cut-throat, it is everything it ought to be at this level. And I admire those guys, the guys who are the elite agents here, they are Scott Boras-type guys. They are really talented guys.

“They’re killers and they are really, really, really good at what they do. You either step up and learn how to do it or somebody else will take your job and do it for you.

“Since I made this decision, I feel physically better. I had that load taken off my shoulders. There’s no doubt in my mind I made the right choice.”

A mini-stroke in the summer of 2009, a health issue he said he’s convinced never would have happened if he hadn’t been “burning the candle at both ends,” prompted Stauffer to slow down somewhat but not all the way.

Now, since he told Baze early last week he was giving up his second job, he said he already can feel the difference.

“You can physically feel it drain out of you,” Stauffer said. “You can actually feel it dissipating.”

And, best of all, he’s still got the one job he loves most.

“Because first and foremost, I’m always going to be a race caller,” he said.

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